Wisconsin is churning out permits for industrial-scale farms to spread millions of gallons of manure on state fields but provides little oversight after that, inspecting them only once or twice every five years, a Wisconsin State Journal investigation has found.

At stake is the health of thousands of homeowners who draw their drinking water from wells near the giant farms or the fields where the manure is spread.

By the end of this year, Wisconsin will have permitted close to 200 of the megafarms to open or expand. In the seven years the state Department of Natural Resources has been in charge of overseeing the operations, no permit request has been turned down, while neighboring states, including Illinois and Michigan, have refused some permits because of threats to water quality. Nor have any Wisconsin permits been revoked even after repeated rule violations.

"The push is always to write permits, write permits," said Mike Vollrath, a former large farm inspector with the DNR who now works in the agency's drinking water section.

The large farms have been a driving force behind the growth in the state's dairy sector, which now adds $26.5 billion a year to the state's economy, and have received strong support from Gov. Jim Doyle and the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. Advocates also credit the farms with giving us cheap milk while boosting jobs and keeping families in the dairy business.

But a review of the state's oversight of the huge farms turned up weaknesses and missteps, including farms operating without permits, a dearth of on-site inspections and a monitoring system that consists largely of inspectors filling out paperwork at their desks. The State Journal's investigation focused on the agency's regulation of so-called factory farms, operations that house at least 700 dairy cows, for example, or 2,500 pigs. The farms are officially known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.

Despite the flaws uncovered by the newspaper, the DNR is considering making the permits easier to obtain and requiring even less scrutiny of many factory farms. The effort to streamline the process by having the DNR issue so-called "general" permits comes at least partly in response to pressure from the Dairy Business Association, an agri-business lobby that has unprecedented influence within the regulatory agency.

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